iPower: The worst Registrar ever?

For the love of God, don't do business with iPower (or iPowerWeb as they are also known).

What a horrible registrar. I wanted to transfer a domain away from them, so I got the login information from my client. I login and search around for a while (20 minutes or so) looking for the transfer authorization (EPP) code. It is nowhere to be found. So I check the help documents. There's plenty of info on transferring domains...in. NOTHING on transferring them OUT.

So I call the "24 hour customer service" line. I am on hold for 40 minutes. I get a kid who sounds like he's 12, but happy to help. He gives me an EPP code over the phone - a 5 digit number. "That doesn't sound right" I said to him. "Normally they are much longer, and consist of numbers, letters, mixed case, etc." He assures me it's right. "Oh," he says, "you have to unlock the domain from opensrs. I'll send a DIFFERENT username/password to the account holders contact email." "Fine," I said. Privately I had misgivings.

So I get off the phone and contact my client again - and ask him to forward me the new email. He does, I plug them into OpenSRS. They don't work. Oddly, they are the exact same crednetials as for the ipower.com site. Basically, that kid didn't know what he was talking about, and I resign myself to calling them again.

And I do call them, and this time the wait is 50 minutes. But it seems the person knows what they're talking about (he sounds like he's early twenties which is an improvement, I suppose). The end result is that he sent the OpenSRS credentials to my client's email address. But by now it's too late to call, so I'll have to wait till tomorrow to ask him to forward the email.

Even godaddy's process isn't that messed up, and that's saying something.

(I discovered I'm not the only one who had a bad experience.)

[Update: I had to bother my client to check his email, and it turned out that NO EMAIL EVER ARRIVED from iPower. So now I'm on the phone, and on chat, hoping to get this resolved. This will be my third and final attempt. I'm thinking that I'm not getting paid enough to deal with this bullshit; alternatively, I could/should have told my client to get the EPP code himself, as he's the one who picked this god awful registrar.]

[Update: I finally had an epiphany: I should update the admin email so I don't have to bother my client. I got on chat, and after a 2 hour 40 minute wait (!), I got someone to email me to the new password, and it works! But get this, because the initial clueless person gave me the WRONG EPP code, and I initiated a transfer, I have to figure out how to stop the transfer with the bad EPP code and restart it with the new one. Lovely. But at least I don't have to deal with iPower ever again. And hey, at least now I know.]